finished with wrapping up all of the gifts and decorating the house and she went to bed, woke up in the morning, and went to take her bath, and she was found in her bathtub. she had died from what we believe to be a heart attack brought on by her seizure, and it was of course heartbreaking for mark twain at this point he had lost his oldest -- his oldestson, his oldest daughter and his wife, liby, had passed away a few years before and so he actually passed away four months later. some argue he passed away from a broken heart but he did die from what he called -- i believe he called a cigar heart. he smoked powerball that is what he died from. so, the items we have been looking at today reflect mark twain's family, the daughters he

raised and who they became over the years, what happened to them. ... new england and america as a whole underestimate the size and importance of human enslavement during their early period of this country. and the story of slave ships in connecticut has never been told. i was led to the lawbooks and

given access to them and time to study and explore them because there was a purpose in it. the purpose was for me to tell their story and share it. when i first came upon the lawbooks, i was then a reporter at the hartford current on special assignment to work on a book about new england slavery. and how big and important and profitable it had been. to discover these logbooks an additional land extraordinary piece of the story, i didn't know at any time there would be connecticut mariners, and provisioning the caribbean which was also a slave based and horrific form of agriculture growing sugar but to discover these logbooks was so important and mine in newspaper backed me up 100%. once we understood the story that was being told in these three voyages the newspaper determined i should go to sierra

leone and retrace the voyage that had been made in 1757. cheese log books are immensely significant not only because of the story they contain but the period, the slave trade was at its height, more people were being taken from africa, stolen and sold into slavery and taken to the caribbean and brought to the american colonies, more taken at that period that at any other period during the long arc of the international slave trade which lasted 400 years. in these log books we have this extraordinary opportunity to see day-by-day how life was lived aboard new england slave ships two of which are from connecticut. i came to the realization that these log books were not maintained as i had earlier sought by the son of a connecticut farmer but by the

son of an aristocrat in new london. and his steam. s, he was only 18, 18 and 19 at the time of these foliages. his father and two of the ships, he was on this voyage, on these foliages as his father's representative to keep track of what was going on on board the ship. one of the remarkable things about the log books is all float it is only 80 pages encompasses three voyages over a period of a year-and-a-half and in that year and a half everything happened. you can almost see dudley starting to grow up in the force of all the things around him. he leaves through london as a young man, easing charge of things for his father, he had never been to africa, he doesn't know what he's getting into, they news under get to africa than a man tries to escape,

mutinies, slave ships were frequent, it was the worst work, it was the worst work. he begins negotiating for the purchase of human beings. once he is in africa he leaves the ship he is gone, and goes to another ship that then goes to the caribbean. once they were on their way to the caribbean, the terrible epidemic breaks out, 12 people died in 18 days, ten of those people i children. she records their deaths day-by-day, he manages to get back to new london and gets on another slave ship his father owned and goes back to africa. when they are on the coast of africa they're captured by the french to take away their vessel and air cargo which consisted of some muskets and trade goods and 13 human beings but he manages again to not come out unscathed, but the governor of a slave

castle in africa returns his ship to dudley and his commander, william taylor. and they sail into the sunset. all of this, people get injured and dudley has fits, people, terrible things happen and it is all very telegraphic reconveyed in this course of any pages but it is 8 huge amounts of motion and experience covered in this. i would walk across the street to the state library and spend all day studying logbooks and then researching the back story, researching the slave trade in new england, who were the players? what was going on? what were the other factors involved? how common was this? what would their lives of been like, my newspaper determined that i should go to this castle where the link traded. it was very interesting to the all-out, visit, spend hours and days there at a time.

we did not say overnight because the island is abandoned. it is just the ruins of the castle. there was at one time caretaker who lived there and the small building he and his wife lived in but no water or any support facilities of any kind, just the ruins of the slaving fortress and the local people who live on neighboring islands believe the island is haunted and they won't stay there overnight and we would notice that the end of the day because we hired local people not only to help us in the day to day but to clear the iron door. the ruins, the jungle growth that just engulfed the ruins, every year. has to be cut back. what i notice, what i felt myself when i was first on this island, it is very hard to talk.

you feel the past, the suffering, it weighs on you so heavily, you feel like you can't talk and remember when we were standing on our first visits, standing in the enclosure where men were held for sale, women and children were held off to the side in a separate area but men to be sold were held in one area. i remember standing in that place, the ground is very broken end you conceive the sky but the walls of the fortress surrounded un you can see where men with guns would have been posted. i remember joe apollo been for me and said what? no questions from the reporter? and he said i understand, no one speaks here. one of the first things i learned about dudley's log books

which surprised me is they are very easy to read. they are perfectly legible. cannot good scholar. spelling was not standardized. i believe he was an educated man but he spelled phonetically. i learned to sound out words the way he would have sounded them out and that would help me find the modern day spelling and locations to which he was referring. he would record the weather for instance, squalls of snow, mall breezes, tumbling c, small wind and thick weather. day-by-day and hourly, every two hours throughout the day he is recording what is going on with the weather, the wind, how they are managing, how fast they're going, how far they have come. this is part of the will of the

log itself. is to keep track, to keep a record of the voyage. part of the role of books such as these was so there would be a record in case a lawsuit later arose from the voyage and the person, the commander or whoever could say no, we were at this latitude, we were at this location on that day and here is what the weather was. this is an era without computer devices, telephones, no way for dudley to record what was going on except with this book. the middle voyage beeves sierra leone, this was in may of 1757. we now have 169 slaves on board. but within just a few days, he says one man's slave, not very well and another is not very

well and as you turn the page you begin to see that more and more people are getting sick, children among them and then they begin to die. one day he says this 24 hours died, two small boy slaves, younger than 12 and they like the others dying in the epidemic that was unfolding, died of a disease that they call the bloody flux but which we know today is amoebic dysentery. in the third foliage documented in these lawbooks, dudley used in an area of west africa that today we would call ghana is in a place called cape coast castle which was a slaveing warehouse and fortress that was also recently agreed in's home office for slaves in west africa.

this was in the summer of 1758. a time when great britain and english colonies were exchanging harassments with the fringe. this was during the 7 years' war and dudley and his commander, william taylor, think they see a shift in the distance and they know who it is that then they discover that this is a man of worship, and the same florentine, the account st. florentine overtakes them, overtaking other new england ships, the men aboard the same florentine take the cargo which at that point included human beings from the new london ship and the king of prussia which was the ship from rhode island and eventually the men were

allowed to, and a commander from rhode island named captain joseph london, they were freed. i don't know what happened to their cargo because it was not returned to them that their ship the fox was returned to them and they were allowed to return to new england. one of the extraordinary things about the log book is this capture, there was a subsequent sea battle, became extremely well known because joseph want and's family was one of the premier families in long island. this man who was captured and came back to new england on the new london vessel later became the governor of rhode island. he was a famous and well-known trader and there were newspapers stories during that period on overtaking the vessel and the vessel being returned and the sea battle was part of it.

and account st. florentine was sunk, objects and wooden doors and things like that begin to flow ashore on the coast of west africa. in studying these blog books either in connecticut was not just a provision of the caribbean, the english caribbean and was not simply sending food and horses and supplies and livestock down to support the culture of the caribbean but local men were also involved in what we might think as the very heart of the slave trade. they were in africa, they were bank men, women and children and bringing them back to the colonies and the caribbean and selling them and some of them were dying along the way and so for me that became the very heart of the story, the document led me to the heart of the story. if new englanders who love to talk about their history by the

way, and they're great achievements and accomplishments and indeed they accomplished great things and they were brave and heroics but they were at, rather than saying and, along with all their accomplishments, in one way or another profiting from stolen labor, the labor and suffering of people who never did them harm and needs to be acknowledged not as a chapter, this is not the sad chapter in new england's history, this is all about new england. >> during booktv's recent visit to hartford, conn. we toward the special collections unit of the harriet beecher stowe center, letters and books related to the novel uncle tom's happen. >> here we are in the archive

fault, archive storage area, a home to our archival and printed book collection, also photographs, pamphlets, any sort of work of art on paper as well, including broadside posters of the nineteenth century and our collections focus around. beecher stowe, and active reform worked in the nineteenth century. you will find collections around and i slavery and abolition in new england, conn. as well as women's history as it relates to the suffrage movement. the center began collecting works on and by harriet beecher stowe and her family as early as our founder in 1930s and 40s, she founded the organization in 1941 and collecting ever since, in the 1970s the house is ready

rare documents. they were looking at collections that focus on harriet beecher stowe who wrote uncle tom's cabin. the most famous antislavery novel which galvanized the anti slavery movement for abolition in the 1850s. these materials we look at today really on the platform for which we are able to instill -- tell the story. and the building she lived in, can tell her story the best we know it but these are tangible references to the past, these are papers and documents she touched, these are books that people all over the country and beyond red, waiting for the next installment and give it as a gift, but these objects really speak to the power of harriet beecher stowe and historic uncle

tom's can have on american and international society. the first thing we will talk about is a circular letter, a rather marge letter, a series of 40 of them and the amazing thing about them it was started by one person in the family who folded it up and mail it to the next sibling who added their portion of the story, their news and passed it on to the next and the next that as it got added onto it became very much filled documents to the point where they are cramming in last-minute notes so the family really was an amazing group of reformers. harriet beecher stowe's father was but for most calvinist minister in new england when she

was a child, raised all 11 of his children to the moral forces in society. they had to do good, make positive change in the appropriate spheres applied to the nineteenth century which meant the four girls had to find other acceptable platforms so. beecher stowe's way of speaking was 3 writing and publishing stories. from the year >> guest: 30s series of letters at this point in. beecher stowe's career she was writing short stories, she was the mother of 5 children at that point and was struggling to make ends meet, her father was a professor, she wasn't -- a career that paid well. she needed to supplement and had to take care of household worries and her children. the best thing she did do was to write, that is what she did. decides to write a short story

of four installments, one of them is here, she begins to write but she quickly realizes that it is going to be a much longer story so she needs to provide substance and documentation. even though it is a novel she wants it to be based on reality so she writes to formerly enslaved people like frederick douglass and while she is writing, we have a letter here dated july 1951 where she stands you may perhaps have noticed in your editorial meeting a series of articles that i am furnishing for the year in title uncle tom's cavett and she goes on to ask for information, true life stories about really what it is

like to be enslaved and be in the system on a plantation as he is one who has that experience. another person she is true like experiences for and took from, the character of uncle tom was joe's i hanson, was enslaved person in maryland who found his way, escape through to canada to dresden, ontario and for public done settlement and there is the museum today in his honor. the narrative speaks, they all do struggle to make a decision to change your life and to get through freedom. harriet beecher stowe's uncle tom's cabin was published as a serial in the national era and it took almost a year to publish the whole story, much longer and

she expected. subscribers to the newspaper, they wanted to hear the next installment, it was so popular that by march of 1852, three months before the end they decided to contract with a publisher, book publisher to publish that in the books so it was finally published as a two volume book seen here, march 20th of 1852, very simple examples. published out of boston. also the publisher created a short version, pictures and stories among old-time's cabin.

quickly the popularity of those books take off, merchandise starts to appear. stars as simple things like children's book and there is international editions, very quickly, french and german come out first. and still published worldwide today in over 70 languages. the mass commercialization moves us into all types of f things for the home. now the story and characters because of copyright are no longer under hearst jurisdiction so uncle tom's cavan wallpaper was one of many pieces of the urgent guys that was produced outside the control of harriet beecher stowe. this is a british printer, very cheaply made because it was

quickly produced for the mass market and the only examples exist in a nursery outside of mel bourne, australia. that speaks to the international power, people wanted an emotional piece, a connection to this story in their homes as they teach their children in a nursery including scenes with a dagger and the death of uncle tom. what does that tell you about society at the time? abolitionists like william garrison, not noticed uncle tom's cabin. his anti abolitionist newspaper the liberator published a story in january of 1853 calls uncle tom's cabin media, and i am

paraphrasing, it is such a manic -- folks have attached themselves to the characters, he says it is taking away from the power to smeal abolition. and the melodrama. uncle tom's cabin is so popular as a stage production that more saw the play it and read the book. speaking to the popularity, one of the first movies ever made in the united states was a porter and is in film, uncle tom's cabin in 1903. everyone knew the story, it was going to sell, and a film, it was just part of american

culture and still is today. her characters you see on the poster, eliza and% harry, enslaved people to join her husband, his father in canada and stopping over in a cabin. hiding there, you realize the gentlemen one came to find them, it is very colorful. you can see the theatricality of the image, rosy cheeks, red lips, heavy makeup, this dates to the 20th century and you can see the specific stage company has chosen to put a photograph of abraham lincoln on one end

and harriet beecher stowe herself on the other, and the adaptation of the play has real authority. and went to a production, in the 1860s, left before it was finished because she didn't recognize her character. they had become so theatrical that they were not proving the point her novel was supposed to make. because uncle tom's cabin was such an international, in great britain, the slave trade in the 1830s. british abolitionists invited. beecher stowe over the grand tour, someone who had never been abroad at all, the daughter of the yankee minister, not coming

from money and her husband and she did not make a lot of money so this is quite something first for her to be thrown into celebrity and receive money all of a sudden but also to be taken and treated as royalty in such a way. was presented with a number of gifts, one of which was 26 large volumes just like this, this is one of them, and petition signed only by women, they contain half a million signatures of women who believed slavery should end in the united states and the idea was carried beecher stowe was to take this, use it as a political, use it for political purposes to really end slavery in the united states so this is

a year after uncle tom's cabin was out as a book and all these women, half a million signatures were collected in a grassroots efforts. we believe by when in church groups, however sort of women's groups match, stacks of petition papers would be there so includes not only the woman's name but the name or profession or occupation of the father or husband at a time when most women did not work outside the home unless they were unmarried or a widow and also their residence so you will see everyone from school mistresses down to the duchess of sutherland, she was presented with this small broach here as well.

this brooch is gold's and circled around a lock of hair that was thomas clarkson, thomas clarkson is a british abolitionists. win. beecher stowe goes to england he has already passed but his widow wishes to present her with something of his and has this made up a is in grave john the back so we know she treasures and she owned a print of clarkson as well and it hung in her home as well as british abolitionists and folks who worked toward human rights during the time she worked so a celebrity author who really change the way americans look at slavery. she was the one through her writing who gave enslaved people, a h